Cold Springs(15)

“Yeah.”

“Liquidated,” Samuel said. “Everything about you gone—squeezed into dollar signs. Like you never existed—not to me, not to your boys, not to nobody. That the way you want it?”

Talia's eyes were Christmas-ornament fragile, the way they always looked when a man started to turn angry on her, got ready to knot his hands into fists. Samuel had seen that look too many times, and it made the bones in his fingers turn to acid.

“I'll leave you the cash,” Talia said. “Let me take Race.”

“Oh, now you're taking Race.”

“He's my son. Just take the money. I owe you.”

“You owe me what?”

She wouldn't say.

“You owe me what?”

“Please.”

“Look at me. Say my name.”

“I got to—it's eight o'clock—Vincent, he—”

“Look at me, girl.”

The knife was in his hand now, melting into his palm, becoming an extension of his fingers.

“Samuel,” she murmured.

“You're not gone yet,” Samuel said. “Not totally. You need to disappear, girl.”

Talia stepped back, sensing that moment on the edge of the railing, when you are still sure you can recover, before you tumble and realize the void is void. That you don't get second chances.

Samuel's knife slashed up, splitting leopard-pattern cloth like the leather satchel, spilling everything like the cash, everything she'd kept inside all those years—her softness, her warmth. He and Talia sank to the floor together like lovers, her fingers hooked into the flesh of his shoulders, her magnolia perfume and her sap-crust hair and the little sounds she was making, whimpering as he made heavy, desperate thrusts—so much like making love—a warm wet spray on his face, dampening his shirt, sticking his sleeves to his arms.

He stopped only when the handle of the knife slipped from his grip, the blade biting his index finger, tangling in a fold of what used to be Talia's sweater. Samuel stayed on his knees, straddling her, his breath shuddering. He sucked at the salty cut on his finger joint. He was wet all over, but it was already starting to dry, starting to cool.

After a long time, he stood, flexed his fingers to keep them from sticking together. He stared at a twenty-dollar bill, floating in a wet red halo. Talia's shoe, twisted at an unnatural angle.

He walked to the bathroom, turned on the shower. He stripped and stood under the warm water, naked, until the needles of heat stopped causing any sensation in his back. He watched swirls of pink curly clouds in the water, tracing the outlines of his toes.

Samuel forgot where he was. He forgot who he was. He felt like someone had gone carefully under his skin with a hot filament, separating the skin from the muscle, so that his face floated on top of someone else's—some other person he didn't like, someone who hadn't turned his life around, who carried a knife and spent every dark hour of the evening, for the past nine years, studying a reflection in the blade, seeing Talia's eyes, Talia's mouth, Talia's cheekbones.

He stepped out of the shower, the house too quiet without the noise of water.

What would he do if Race walked in with his girl right now?

He stood na**d in the bedroom doorway, looking down at Talia in her sticky nest of money, her eyes soft and dewy and staring at the ceiling, looking straight through to Jesus.

Something glinted at her hip. Samuel knelt beside her, hooked his pinky around a loop of silver chain, and pulled the necklace out of her pocket. He laid it across his palm, read the inscription. His eyes began to burn. He remembered a warm brown throat, slender fingers lifting the chain, rubbing it nervously across full red lips.

Samuel looked at the flattened leather satchel at Talia's feet. He imagined the phone call, the offer to buy the house. He understood the deal better than Talia ever had—the rich man trying to get around him, trying to take control of the situation, get his daughter free of the Montrose family.

Samuel had tried to be restrained. He had tried to forgive. And now the girl's father had broken the rules, stepped over the boundary.

He wanted a final settlement? He wanted to pay the big price?

Samuel could arrange that.

He wiped the necklace clean, then dropped it into the blood next to Talia's left breast.

2

The call haunted Chadwick all week.

Monday, he and his trainee Olsen escorted a student from Cold Springs to Hunter's Playa Verde campus in Belize. The whole flight down, the 737 angling into the sun, making hammered gold out of the Gulf of Mexico, Chadwick thought of Ann Zedman.

“It's Mallory,” she had said, her voice so thick with worry that Chadwick hardly recognized it. “I don't know who else to turn to.”

Chadwick had wanted to ask a thousand questions, but each was a jump across a nine-year chasm. He knew he couldn't make it.

Tuesday, he and Olsen flew back to the States for an escort job in Los Angeles—a Korean girl named Soo-yun who had neon-blue contact lenses, a severe case of bulimia, and the keys to her father's gun cabinet. She locked herself in the bathroom at her parents' produce market on Western Avenue. Chadwick tried to talk her out, but when that didn't work he called her bluff, busting down the door and pulling the gun out of her hands. The gun turned out to be unloaded. Soo-yun's dazed but relieved parents gave him a basket of papayas to take on the plane. That night, on the red-eye flight east, his clothes smelling of ripe fruit, Chadwick thought of Ann Zedman.